W. H. Auden's "September 1, 1939"

Here it is again: September 1, 1939, eighty-four years later. Can you picture Auden at The Dizzy Club, that "dive" on Fifty-Second Street, (aka Swing Street) on that terrible day when the Germans invaded Poland and quaked the earth? One of the best stanzas is a metaphorical description of that bar and others like it.

Click here for the poem and here for the program that Michael Braziller and I did in fall 2008 on this and other of Auden's poems written after Wystan moved to New York City from England in 1939. 

Quiz of the day:
WHA disliked the last line of the penultimate stanza because he felt it was "dishonest," by which I think he meant "untrue."

He changed it to
(1) We must love one another and die
(2) We must love one another or die
(3) We must love one another or diet
(4) One must love mother nature or die
(5) If winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Light up a Winston and think of dear Wystan. Bragging rights go to the winner!

-- DL

Comments

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

My own recollection of that last line in the penultimate stanza was that Auden, troubled by what he deemed the inanity of "We must love one another or die," changed it to "We must love one another and die." But even that troubled him for, after all, we all die. Volition or opinion has no role in that. In his mind the "what" of death becomes a kind of reductio ad absurdum or, perhaps worse, infelicitous sentimentality. In Auden's mind, either line was at best cumbersome and at worst insipid. It's why he apparently decided to cut the entire stanza. Still unsatisfied, he concluded "the whole poem, I realized, was infected with an incurable dishonesty--and must be scrapped." Thank God that posterity made the ultimate decision. My final point is that Auden's own struggle with wording in the poem is, in and of itself, a cogent indication of just how seriously he regarded the enormity of Germany's invasion of Poland. What words befit such an event and what it portends? But bringing light to truth is its own enduring testament. That's why Auden's poem was and is unkillable.

[David Schloss]

A fine succinct commentary, I think, Dr, Hitchner.

[David Lehman]

In an effort to rescue the stanza, academics have offered all sorts of interpretations of the line, "We must love another or die," including the biological, in which the perpetuation of the race depends on the act of copulation.

[Alexander Lazarus Wolfff]

1 -- "We must love one another and die."

I learned this via Buddhism: a Buddhist monk mentioned Auden's change.I wish I remembered the name of the sermon.